The Talisman by Stephen King

“Sure. Go to the Point Venuti drugstore and fetch me a bot-

tle of Lydia Pinkham’s ointment.” Speedy shook his head.

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“You know how to he’p Speedy Parker, boy. Get the Talisman.

That’s all the he’p I need.”

Jack blew into the nozzle.

3

A very short time later he was pushing in the stopper located beside the tail of a raft shaped like a four-foot-long rubber horse with an abnormally broad back.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to get Richard on this thing,”

he said, not complaining but merely thinking out loud.

“He be able to follow orders, ole Travellin Jack. Just sit behind him, kind of he’p hold him on. That’s all he needs.”

And in fact Richard had pulled himself into the lee of the

standing rocks and was breathing smoothly and regularly

through his open mouth. He might have been either asleep or awake, Jack could not tell which.

“All right,” Jack said. “Is there a pier or something out behind that place?”

“Better than a pier, Jacky. Once you gets out beyond the

break-water, you’ll see big pilins—they built part of the hotel right out over the water. You’ll see a ladder down in them

pilins. Get Richard there up the ladder and you be on the big deck out back. Big windows right there—the kind of windows that be doors, you know? Open up one of them window-

doors and you be in the dinin room.” He managed to smile.

“Once you in the dinin room, I reckon you’ll be able to sniff out the Talisman. And don’t be afraid of her, sonny. She’s

been waitin for you—she’ll come to your hand like a good

hound.”

“What’s to stop all these guys from coming in after me?”

“Shoo, they can’t go in the black hotel.” Disgust with Jack’s stupidity was printed in every line on Speedy’s face.

“I know, I mean in the water. Why wouldn’t they come af-

ter me with a boat or something?”

Now Speedy managed a painful but genuine smile. “I

think you gonna see why, Travellin Jack. Ole Bloat and his

boys gotta steer clear of the water, hee hee. Don’t worry bout that now—just remember what I told you and get to gettin,

hear?”

“I’m already there,” Jack said, and edged toward the rocks

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to peer around at the beach road and the hotel. He had man-

aged to get across the road and to Speedy’s cover without being seen: surely he could drag Richard the few feet down to the water and get him on the raft. With any luck at all, he should be able to make it unseen all the way to the pilings—

Gardener and the men with binoculars were concentrating on

the town and the hillside.

Jack peeked around the side of one of the tall columns.

The limousines still stood before the hotel. Jack put his head out an inch or two farther to look across the street. A man in a black suit was just stepping through the door of the wreck of the Kingsland Motel—he was trying, Jack saw, to keep from

looking at the black hotel.

A whistle began to shrill, as high and insistent as a

woman’s scream.

“Move!” Speedy whispered hoarsely.

Jack jerked his head up and saw at the top of the grassy

rise behind the crumbling houses a black-suited man blasting away at the whistle and pointing straight downhill at him. The man’s dark hair swayed around his shoulders—hair, black

suit, and sunglasses, he looked like the Angel of Death.

“FOUND HIM! FOUND HIM!” Gardener bawled.

“SHOOT HIM! A THOUSAND DOLLARS TO THE

BROTHER WHO BRINGS ME HIS BALLS!”

Jack recoiled back into the safety of the rocks. A half-

second later a bullet spanged off the front of the middle pillar just before the sound of the shot reached them. So now I know, Jack thought as he grabbed Richard’s arm and pulled him toward the raft. First you get knocked down, then you hear the gun go off.

“You gotta go now,” Speedy said in a breathless rush of

words. “In thirty seconds, there’s gonna be a lot more shootin.

Stay behind the breakwater as long’s you can and then cut

over. Get her, Jack.”

Jack gave Speedy a frantic, driven look as a second bullet

smacked into the sand before their little redoubt. Then he

pushed Richard down in the front of the raft and saw with

some satisfaction that Richard had enough presence of mind

to grasp and hang on to the separate rubbery tufts of the

mane. Speedy lifted his right hand in a gesture both wave and

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blessing. On his knees Jack gave the raft a shove which sent it almost to the edge of the water. He heard another trilling blast of the whistle. Then he scrambled to his feet. He was still running when the raft hit the water, and was wet to the waist

when he pulled himself into it.

Jack paddled steadily out to the break-water. When he

reached the end, he turned into unprotected open water and

began paddling.

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After that, Jack concentrated on his paddling, firmly putting out of his mind any considerations of what he would do if

Morgan’s men had killed Speedy. He had to get under the pilings, and that was that. A bullet hit the water, causing a tiny eruption of droplets about six feet to his left. He heard another ricochet off the breakwater with a ping. Jack paddled forward with his whole strength.

Some time, he knew not how long, went by. At last he

rolled off the side of the raft and swam to the back, so that he could push it even faster by scissoring his legs. An almost imperceptible current swept him nearer his goal. At last the pilings began, high crusty columns of wood as thick around as

telephone poles. Jack raised his chin out of the water and saw the immensity of the hotel lifting itself above the wide black deck, leaning out over him. He glanced back and to his right, but Speedy had not moved. Or had he? Speedy’s arms looked

different. Maybe—

There was a flurry of movement on the long grassy descent

behind the row of falling-down houses. Jack looked up and

saw four of the men in black suits racing down toward the

beach. A wave slapped the raft, almost taking it from his

grasp. Richard moaned. Two of the men pointed toward him.

Their mouths moved.

Another high wave rocked the raft and threatened to push

both raft and Jack Sawyer back toward the beach.

Wave, Jack thought, what wave?

He looked up over the front of the raft as soon as it dipped again into a trough. The broad gray back of something surely too large to be a mere fish was sinking beneath the surface. A

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shark? Jack was uneasily conscious of his two legs fluttering out behind him in the water. He ducked his head under, afraid he’d see a long cigar-shaped stomach with teeth sweeping toward him.

He did not see that shape, not exactly, but what he saw as-

tounded him.

The water, which appeared now to be very deep, was as

full as an aquarium, though one containing no fish of normal size or description. In this aquarium only monsters swam. Beneath Jack’s legs moved a zoo of outsize, sometimes horren-

dously ugly animals. They must have been beneath him and

the raft ever since the water had grown deep enough to ac-

commodate them, for the water was crowded everywhere.

The thing that had frightened the renegade Wolfs glided by

ten feet down, long as a southbound freight train. It moved upward as he watched. A film over its eyes blinked. Long

whiskers trailed back from its cavernous mouth—it had a

mouth like an elevator door, Jack thought. The creature glided past him, pushing Jack closer to the hotel with the weight of the water it displaced, and raised its dripping snout above the surface. Its furry profile resembled Neanderthal Man’s.

Ole Bloat and his boys gotta steer clear of the water,

Speedy had told him, and laughed.

Whatever force had sealed the Talisman in the black hotel

had set these creatures in the waters off Point Venuti to make sure that the wrong people kept away; and Speedy had known

it. The great bodies of the creatures in the water delicately nudged the raft nearer and nearer the pilings, but the waves they made kept Jack from getting all but the most fragmen-tary view of what was happening on shore.

He rode up a crest and saw Sunlight Gardener, his hair

flowing out behind him, standing beside the black fence levelling a long heavy hunting rifle at his head. The raft sank into the trough; the shell sizzled past far overhead with the noise of a hummingbird’s passing; the report came. When Gardener